In the new issue of Regulation, economist Pierre Lemieux argues that the recent oil price decline is at least partly the result of increased supply from the extraction of shale oil. The increased supply allows the economy to produce more goods, which benefits some people, if not all of them. Thus, contrary to some commentary in the press, cheaper oil prices cannot harm the economy as a whole.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

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Archives: 05/2009

A couple of weeks ago, I ripped apart a factually anemic but all-too-typical USA Today article decrying the plight of student debtors. Today, the grand journalistic tradition of anecdote-and-pity laden reporting on student debt continues with offerings from Business Week and The New York Times.

In an article about tight times for student loan forgiveness programs, The Old Gray Lady sticks with the journalistic tried-and-true by leading with an extreme anecdote that readers, presumably, are supposed to see as illustrating typical suffering:

When a Kentucky agency cut back its program to forgive student loans for schoolteachers, Travis B. Gay knew he and his wife, Stephanie — both special-education teachers — were in trouble.

“We’d gotten married in June and bought a house, pretty much planned our whole life,” said Mr. Gay, 26. Together, they had about $100,000 in student loans that they expected the program to help them repay over five years.

Then, he said, “we get a letter in the mail saying that our forgiveness this year was next to nothing.”

Now they are weighing whether to sell their three-bedroom house in Lawrenceburg, Ky., some 20 miles west of Lexington. Otherwise, Mr. Gay said, “it’s going to be very difficult for us to do our student loan payments, house payments and just eat.”

Please, Mr. Gay (and Mr. Glater, the author of this heart-string puller)! You, and presumably your wife, are only in your mid-twenties, have what appears to be a very nice home according to the picture accompanying the article, and yet have the nerve to assert that taxpayers should eat your student loans lest you not eat at all!

This is simple greed – you know, the stuff for which the media regularly excoriates “big business” – but readers are expected to see it as suffering because it involves recent college grads. Oh, and grads who have gone into teaching, according to Glater “a high-value but often low-paying” field. That the Gays have felt wealthy enough to buy a house despite holding much greater than normal student debt – and the fact that on an hourly basis teachers get paid on par with comparable professionals – doesn’t present any impediment to the reporter repeating the baseless underpaid teacher myth. It’s all just part of the standard narratives.

Business Week’s piece isn’t much better than the Times’, though at least reporter John Tozzi had the decency not to start off with an emotionally manipulative anecdote of supposed human suffering. His third paragraph, however, centers around “analysis” from the student-centric Project on Student Debt, and he rolls out the ol’ Tale of Woe right after:

“It’s just so frustrating,” says Susan D. Strayer, director of talent acquisition for Ritz-Carlton in Washington. “They tell you to be self-made. They tell you get yourself a good education and you can get yourself into a pretty big hole.” Strayer, 33, has $90,000 in student loan debt from her bachelor’s at Virginia Tech and a master’s from George Washington University. She also has an MBA from Vanderbilt University, which she earned on a full scholarship—but skipped two years of earnings to acquire. Strayer says her monthly loan payments of $600 barely budge the principal on her debt. She doesn’t regret her educational decisions, although she says the debt load has made her put off plans to pursue a consulting side business full-time.

So Ms. Strayer chose one of the most expensive schools in the country —George Washington — for a Master’s (in what we do not know); we have no information about why she chose to finance her education through loans (she and her parents bought new cars, clothes, and stereos instead of saving for college, perhaps?); but we are supposed to feel it is a terrible thing that at 33 she hasn’t been able to start a full-time consulting business. Why is that, exactly?

Thankfully, though he frontloads anecdotes and pity parties, Tozzi ends his piece with a clear, if far too rare, voice of reason:

“It’s easy for me to say, ‘Oh, I have all this student loan debt,’ but I chose to take it and I have to deal with the consequences of that choice,” [24-year-old] Patricia Hudak says. “So many people in my generation think of everything as a short-term investment with immediate return.”

Finally, someone I can truly feel sorry for! Why? Because with journalists cheering it on, Ms. Hudak is exactly the kind of person that our political system will punish, making her pay not only for her own choices, but those of the Gays, Ms. Strayer, and countless other student debtors who really do think that everything, and everybody, should give them an immediate — and huge — payoff.

The Cato Institute media department sent this press release to media outlets in Latin America, after the Venezuelan government tried to shut down a Cato-sponsored conference this week:

CAUCAGUA, VENEZUELA—A Cato Institute educational seminar fell victim to an attempt by the Venezuelan government to shut it down for expressing ideas critical of the Chavez regime.

Numerous Venezuelan government agencies harassed the Cato Institute event, called Universidad El Cato-CEDICE, or “Cato University,” which took place in Caucagua, Venezuela May 24-26. The event is co-sponsored by the Venezuelan free-market think tank Centro de Divulgación del Conocimiento Económico por la Libertad (CEDICE) and was organized to teach and promote the classical liberal principles of limited government, individual liberty, free markets and peace.

During the course of the event on Monday, the National Guard, state television and a state representative from a ministry of higher education interrupted the seminar, demanding that the seminar be shut down on the grounds that the event organizers did not have permission to establish a university in Venezuela. When the authorities were told that neither Cato nor CEDICE was establishing a university and that the Cato Institute has long sponsored student seminars called Cato Universities, the authorities then insisted that the seminar was in violation of Venezuelan law for false advertising.

After two hours of groundless accusations, the Chavez representatives left but their harassment has continued. One of the speakers at the seminar, Peruvian intellectual Alvaro Vargas Llosa, was detained by airport authorities Monday afternoon for three hours for no apparent reason. He was released and told that he could stay in the country as long as he did not express political opinions in Venezuela.

“The government’s attacks on freedom of speech are part of a worrying pattern of abuse of power in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela,” said Ian Vasquez, director of Cato’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, from Caucagua. “But they have so far not managed to alter the plans of the Cato Institute here, and will hopefully not do so, as we continue to participate in further meetings the rest of this week.”

For more information about Cato programs in Latin America, visit www.ElCato.org.

UPDATE (5/27, 2:30 PM EST) Cato just received word from scholar Ian Vásquez that “Chavistas are gathering in front of the conference hotel now…Cato is all over state TV.”

Vásquez snapped this photo of people carrying anti-Cato signs and protesting the conference.

With just one sentence, Tom Sowell thoroughly demolishes Colin Powell’s statist assertion that the American people want higher taxes:

Just days after Colin Powell informed us that the American people were willing to pay higher taxes in order to get government services– and that Republicans therefore needed to stop their opposition to taxes– California voters resoundingly defeated a bill to raise taxes in order to pay for the many government services in that liberal state.

The AP reports on a plan unfolding in Arizona to help keep foster children and kids with disabilities in schools of their choice:

Republican-backed legislation to create new tax credits to help hundreds of foster children and disabled children attend private schools is advancing in the Legislature.

On a special session’s second day, Senate and House committees on Tuesday endorsed the bill creating new corporate and insurance premium tax credits for donations for private school tuition grants.

Priority would go initially to foster and disabled children who received vouchers that have been ruled unconstitutional by the Arizona Supreme Court.

The Arizona Supreme Court has specifically and emphatically upheld education tax credits, so this effort should succeed if passed and signed. The ever-wacky 9th Circuit Court of Appeals recently created some confusion over the details of tax credit program administration, but the credit approach to funding school choice has never been eliminated by the courts … they should be put back in their place on this case as they have in so many others.

Good luck to the children who had their voucher program overturned … this should be a no-brainer for the politicians.

Daniel Hannan, the British Member of the European Parliament who gained fame with his devastating critique of Gordan Brown, has been equally trenchant in criticizing the excesses of the European Union. On his blog he explains the latest self-serving intricacies of voting in the upcoming election for the European Parliament:

How many MEPs will be elected a week on Thursday? Wait! Come back! I’m going somewhere with this! I realise the issue might not sound intrinsically sexy but, believe me, it demonstrates everything that’s wrong with the Brussels system. Bear with me and you will see how flagrant is the EU’s contempt for the ballot box – and for its own rule book.

Had the European Constitution Lisbon Treaty been ratified, there would have been 754 MEPs in the next Parliament. But under the existing scheme – that provided for by the Nice Treaty – there are meant to be 736. Three countries have rejected the European Constitution in referendums, and it is not legally in force. So how many MEPs will be elected a week on Thursday?

You don’t need me to tell you, do you? The EU’s primary purpose is to look after its own. Eighteen unconstitutional or “phantom” Euro-MPs will be elected anyway (hat-tip, Bruno), and will draw their full salaries and allowances. The only concession to the letter of law is that they won’t be allowed to vote. In other words – in an almost perfect metaphor for the entire Euro-system – they will be paid without having any function. (Incidentally, a couple of BNP trolls keep posting here to asking when I’m going to publish my expenses. I did so ages ago – see here – and all Conservative MEPs have done the same: our Right to Know forms are available online here.)

The number of Euro-MPs in the chamber might seem a recondite issue, but it goes to the heart of how the EU behaves. Other, more important, parts of the European Constitution have also been implemented, without the tedious process of formal ratification: a European foreign policy, the harmonisation of justice and home affairs, justiciability for the Charter of Fundamental Rights. These things would have been regularised by the European Constitution, but have been enacted despite its rejection.

It’s almost as good as unconstitutionally giving Washington, D.C. a congressman!

In fact, the attempt to consolidate continental government without giving the European people much say over the political system they live under is even more bizarre than electing MEPs who might never be able to vote. If implemented, the Lisbon Treaty will reduce the ability of the European people to hold their government accountable, but that’s just the point to the Eurocratic elite actively pushing further centralization of power. About the only barriers left to the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty are the Irish people and Czech President Vaclav Klaus, as I detail in a recent article on American Spectator online.

Last week was an interesting week for transparency, with some good news and some bad news.

On the “good” side of the ledger, the administration rolled out “Data.gov,” a growing set of data feeds provided by U.S. government agencies. These will permit the public to do direct oversight of the kind I discussed at our “Just Give Us the Data!” policy forum back in December.

My metric of whether Data.gov is a success will be when independent users and Web sites use government data to produce new and interesting information and applications. The Sunlight Foundation has a contest underway to promote just that. Get ready for really interesting, cool, direct public oversight of the government.

Also under the White House’s new “Open Government Initiative,” an Open Government Dialogue “brainstorming session” began last week. The public can submit ideas for making the government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. This is important stuff, an outgrowth of President Obama’s open government directive, issued on his first full day in office.

That directive called for the Office of Management and Budget to require specific actions of agencies “within 120 days,” which meant the final product was due last week. And that missed deadline is where we start to slide into the “bad” on the transparency ledger.

Last week, President Obama gave an important speech on national security (which I blogged about here and here). But you couldn’t find the speech in the “Speeches” section of the Whitehouse.gov Web site. It’s buried elsewhere. That’s “basic Web site malpractice,” I told NextGov.com. And I cautioned my friends in the transparency community not to forget Government 1.0 for all the whiz-bang Gov 2.0 projects flashing before our eyes. Whitehouse.gov should be a useful, informative resource for average Americans.

The current top proposal on the “brainstorming” site referred to above is to require a 72-hour mandatory public review period on major spending bills. This is reminiscent of President Obama’s promise to hold bills five days before signing them. But, as Stephen Dinan reports in the Washington Times, the president signed several more bills last week without holding them the requisite time.

The White House protests that they posted links to bills on the Thomas Web site at the Whitehouse.gov blog. But that does not give the public meaningful review of the bills in their final form, as they have come to the president from Congress. “Posting a link from WhiteHouse.gov to THOMAS of a conference report that is expected to pass doesn’t cut it,” says John Wonderlich at Sunlight.

President Obama signed nine new laws since we last reviewed his record on the “Sunlight Before Signing” promise. Alas, it’s been a case study in pulling defeat from the jaws of victory.

Five of the bills were held by the White House more than five days before the president signed them, but they weren’t posted! Simply posting them on Whitehouse.gov in final form would have satisfied “Sunlight Before Signing.”

President Obama’s average drops to .043, and that’s crediting him one win for the DTV Delay Act, which was posted at Whitehouse.gov in its final form for five days after Congress passed it, but before presentment, which is the logical time to start the five-day clock.

Here is the latest tally of bills passed by Congress, including the date presented, date signed, whether they’ve been posted or linked to at Whitehouse.gov, and whether they’ve been posted for the full five days after presentment. (Corrections welcome - there is no uniform way that the White House is posting bills or links, so I may have missed something.)